Or should I?

It has been a long time and I finally decided to type something, something other than my scientific assignment.

Alright, let's talk about my project..Excuse me, it is the only topic I could think of at this point.

I'm working with mice embryogenesis with the help of ENU screen. Luckily we have identified some genes that play pivotal roles in early Gastrulation. The ENU mutagenesis screen, which other people scorned at a couple of years ago, becomes prevalent in this genome era. Now everything is working well and this untraditional approach on mammals seems quite promising. On the other hand, those genes that have been newly revealed are uploaded into public genome browsers, creating the huge golem knowing neither his own strength nor the extent of his ignorance.

 So here is a little comment in regards to the golem.

Being the victim, we trusted the bogus claim from the browser where no EST makes sense in terms of the hypothetical transcript. We have to re-evaluate the information and annotate our new transcript. That is the normal process. When you go back and find out everything you’ve done is correct, you start to blame somebody else.

Being the benefiter, we could at least locate where we are at a molecular level. Some group published a paper, reporting the loss-and-gain function experiment of the homologous gene of interest for our project in invertebrates. It turns out they deleted a wrong region that didn’t cover the homologe. In this case, we have repeated and failed to get the phenotype, of course. Therefore this funny IMA gene brought us back to the public browser and made it possible for us to generate our own iRNA strain.

My work, as I mentioned before, is about the characterization of the dimple mutant, which has defects during epithelial to mesenchymal transition at early gastrulation. The name of the mutant, dimple, comes from the remarked phenotype in the embryo where cells don’t migrate properly at the primitive streak as if there was an indentation. I won’t go into detail unless you really want to read my 30-page thesis, which I haven’t done yet.

The candidate gene that is affected in dimple is called MAGI1, a tight junction associated protein. Nevertheless, we are not quite sure if the point mutation introduced from mutagenesis is really inside the ORF or at some regulatory element. Generally, it is a tough acorn. If we are lucky enough to locate the mutation, which highly likely affects alternative splicing, we would be able to perform a very cool experiment. First we will demonstrate the high caliber of post-transcriptional regulation during morphpgenesis. In addition, we will provide some insights about how cell migration directs the progress of embryogenesis. Anyway, this will be the big picture where my portion would be either too vague or too mediocre.      

If you are still awake and keep reading, I would like to announce that I am going to end this prosaic entry. My personal life out side the lab is great and I do some other stuff.  Just so you know that my future five years are doomed in a nice city in the east coast, welcome to stop by and we shall go out to have some shots. My anecdotes during the interview probably would also take another entire page to tell but as I promised, this is the end.